The present invention relates to wall construction, and, more particularly, to a form of dry wall construction in which wall panels are removably secured to a supporting structural framework comprised of studs or the like by means of fastening clips.
It is extremely desirable, particularly in commercial building construction, to provide building partitions and walls and systems for assembling such partitions and walls in which the entire partition of wall may be easily removed or in which individual panel members making up the partition or wall can be removed, rearranged or replaced with doors, windows or other openings or units. Numerous systems and wall construction methods have been proposed for accomplishing this result. Many of the systems proposed rely on the use of specially constructed panels which permit them to be removably disposed on the supporting structure and/or utilize supporting structures, e.g. studs, which are of special design and hence expensive to manufacture.
Typical of demountable dry wall construction systems which use fastening clips to removably secure panels to wall studs is the system shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,922,764 to Downing, Jr.
The fastening clips used in the system disclosed in the Downing patent, as well as fastening clips used in other prior art systems suffer from the disadvantage that if the wall panel is warped or bowed, a flush joint between abutting channels is difficult to achieve. Additionally, most prior art fastening clips which employ resilient gripping of the support member by the clip suffer from the disadvantage that the clip can easily slip off of the support member. This is particularly true in the cases where the wall panel is warped and hence the fastening clip is subjected to higher than normal disengagement forces.